This is a followup to yesterday’s essay Conflict: The Norm of Current Civilization. Remember our definition of CONFLICT as the struggle to avoid loss—the struggle to avoid being hurt.
Barry Carter
The primary problem with wealth creation systems of the Win/Lose Era is that they have limited the levels of emotional and spiritual intelligence in people. This is because wealth creation in this era has been fear based. The desire to control others comes directly from fear and mistrust.
For our present level of maturity if the consequence of losing did not exist, the drive to win would not be so important. When humans were in the hunter gather era and the rule was “Eat or Be Eaten,” losing could mean death or pain. If losing had meant no discomfort then winning would not have been so important. The fear of losing, at least in the Win/Lose Era, makes winning extremely important. It forces us reactively and defensively to look for ways not to lose first as opposed to looking for ways to proactively win. This rule still holds true in our Industrial Age based civilization.
Fear, therefore, is the primary motivator in the win/lose era. This fear-based paradigm is deeply ingrained within human’s today. Our normal view of human nature is that of humans being competitive, selfish, judgmental, greedy, sinful, lazy and violent. Our thinking is that humans must be restrained against their natural tendencies through rules, regulations, discipline, punishment and must be managed, regulated and led by strong men. Our paradigm of human nature is, however, merely a reflection of our finite wealth creation, win/lose paradigm based upon fear.
Our wealth creation paradigm is a scarcity paradigm. Win/lose activity, fear and competitiveness drove wealth creation. Our fear based insecurities drove people to compete. These insecurities, however, breed low emotional intelligence and spiritual awareness. They breed victims. A finite wealth era in fact is fueled by mass victimization.
Our scarcity and mass victimization paradigm actually worked to created wealth in the win/lose era with such institutions as serfdom and representative public work. Today as we near breakpoint, victimization limits and subtracts from wealth creation. Books such as A Nation of Victims, Culture of Complaint, or Content of our Character show just how pervasive victimization is. Many believe that we only recently became a society of victims. What has happened, however, is that victimization has recently become dysfunctional. Rather than contributing to the growth of society, it today has begun to subtract from it.
A society filled with victims simply does work very well today. Perhaps it never did for most people. Nonetheless society was able to advance significantly in the past and progress from mass victimization. Today the old paradigm of wealth creation based upon mass victimization is too weak to support a civilization at our level of advancement. This paradigm presently falls short of fulfilling human needs and thus builds deficits.
Programmed for Win/Lose
We, in essence, have been programmed for a win/lose reality. Our brain is made of billions of neurons which communicate with each other as we learn things. When we experience something, we create a physical connection between neurons called neural connections. These connections form neural networks. Whatever environment we spend our time in forms our neural network. It becomes our reality. It forms the window or paradigm from which we see the world.
I recently read about a study of kittens in The Dynamics of high Self-Esteem by Marvin Fremerman. One group spent a year (starting at birth) in a white room with only vertical lines. A second group grew up in a room with only horizontal lines. A third group grew up in a plain white room. All of the kittens were then put into a normal room. The kittens from the horizontal line room kept bumping into vertical objects such as chair legs. The kittens from the vertical line room kept bumping into horizontal objects. The kittens from the plain white room bumped into horizontal and vertical objects. They had difficulty perceiving what was not in the paradigm because they had not developed the necessary neural connections.
Our environment has been one of win/lose and scarcity–the fear of defeat and the drive to win. Scrapping over-limited resources has been the norm. Win/lose is filled with loss, pain and the fear of losing. A single painful event can produce what has been called a false neural association, distress pattern or habit pattern. It later produces behavior consistent with this original neural network, when this group of neurons is called on by the individual. Many times this behavior is destructive to the individual or others, but the individual usually cannot perceive the irrationality. If we spend time in a bad, warped, painful, destructive or win/lose environment, our neural connections get mapped this way, just like the kittens. We then see all of life through this extremely clouded and distorted window, based upon fear. We all, to varying degrees, have been programmed to see through a win/lose fear based window. This is our victim window and in many cases it limits our self-awareness and blinds us from seeing the roles we play in creating our own problems.
Today we are addicted to the win/lose and victimization paradigm. It is a key element of wealth creation in the finite wealth era. As we look back at history, a key to winning and prospering has been seeing from one’s own limited paradigm. It has been the key to surviving and thriving in the win/lose era. Our scarcity based competitive civilization is driven by the inability to see from other’s perspectives–to disconnect, to objectify, to blame and judge. If one empathizes with one’s opponent too much one may lose. This could mean loss of a job, it could mean poverty or even death in the Win/Lose Era.
When a lion kills its prey it does not think of or care that this is another living, feeling being. The lion objectifies the animal. To see it as a living, feeling being could cause the lion to hesitate and starve. In a Win/Lose Era, in order to survive one had to see primarily from one’s own perspective and ignore other’s perspectives. One had to be able to objectify, shut off feeling and not empathize very much with the opponent. In the win/lose paradigm it is, therefore, more important to get one’s own point across than to listen and attempt to hear another’s perspective.
Today, when one gang member kills another or someone rapes or murders someone, the perpetrator must objectify the victim. In war, business competition and sports, we take the same win/lose objectification approach. We must be desensitized to the other’s feelings in order to perform the heinous act. We see only from our perspective. We’re the good guy and they’re the bad guy, or a mere object.
Our society is obsessed with the good guy/bad guy division as our movies, television programs and children’s cartoons reflect. Exactly the same process operates within our win/lose companies. A product line fails to meet the production and quality rates and the Process Engineer finds one hundred valid reasons why it is Production’s fault. Production likewise finds a hundred valid reasons why it is Process Engineering’s fault. They both are correct, but the problems persist.
There is a continuing search for who is the bad guy and good guy by all parties. There is continuous judgment. There is always the absolute belief by the individual that “I am the good guy.” There is always the victimization cry of “Look what he did to me.” Both parties can only see from their own perspective. Both parties clearly and correctly see the other person’s flaws but not their own. With our limited emotional intelligence, we therefore require bureaucrats to judge the situation.
The good guy/bad guy syndrome is so pervasive that it is not uncommon for two opposing sports teams to pray to the same god to allow them to defeat one another. In fact, all of our society is based upon win/lose judgment from companies, to religion, to schools, to the judicial system and more. “My way is the only way.” “If you don’t believe in my religion you’re going to hell.” Many people even believe in a God who will judge them in death. Ours is a judgmental worldview.
Entire nations of people have been able to see other nations or races through a paradigm that viewed the other people as mere objects, bad, evil or worthy of a harsh wrath. Americans saw and still see the conquering of North America as a good thing done by brave men. This comes from our ability to see only from our perspective. They, “the Indians,” were the bad guys and we “white Americans” were the good guys. We saw the mass genocide of Native Americans as a good thing, with a holocaust of over 9.6 million out of 10 million Native Americans killed or murdered, as we stole their land.
Even today we still glorify the people who committed this genocide as heroes. We live in denial regarding this holocaust and the feelings of the people on the other side. This ability for denial is rooted in our evolved ability to only see events from our limited perspective. It is rooted in our neural connections. Ask 100 Americans what percent of the Indians were eliminated in the conquering of North America and likely none will say 96% or 9.6 out of 10 million. This is because we live in denial and this denial allows us to cope with the things we must do to survive in a win/lose finite wealth worldview.
If the Native Americans had won the war and repelled the invasion from Europe, those like Geronimo would likely be seen in the same light as a George Washington. Those like Columbus would likely be in a classification alongside Hitler. If Hitler had won the war, he likely would be seen as the hero who set us on our present path. We today would be evolving into an Information Age and away from all totalitarian organizations. We would likely credit him with setting us on this path. There would be denial of the six million Jews which were killed. This is true today with many of his followers as they live in denial.
The fear paradigms created in the Win/Lose Era are passed from parent to child as we socialize children to survive in the Win/Lose Era. They are passed from generation to generation through learned behavior. Though much of the parental and social conditioning is unintentional it is still passed on. We spank and yell at our kids, we drive them to compete, we toughen them to survive a tough world.
Our ability to see only our reality served us well in the win/lose paradigm of the past, where we needed to deny the pain of others in order to live. The clouded window of only seeing from one’s own paradigm must be replaced in order for us to survive the transition we face.
Win/Lose Wealth Created from Fear and Victimization
The ability to focus only from one’s own perspective is driven by fear. It is driven by the fear of losing what one has. This even includes the aggressor. The lion fears losing her own life if she is unable to make the kill. The aggressor can even feel victimized because the prey will not submit. When I was sixteen I used to deer hunt with my father and a group of about thirty hunters. We hunted Southern style with a pack of dogs, CB radios, four wheel drive trucks and, of course, alcohol for courage. We’d turn the dogs loose on a country road. They’d go in and flush out the deer. No matter which way the deer ran we’d hear the dogs barking, communicate this to each over CB radios, drive to that section of the road and form a line along the road. We’d then shoot the deer as he crossed–execution style.
We had everything in our favor, plus the fact that none of us were going to go hungry if we didn’t make a kill. Even with everything in our favor our behavior was driven by fear. One day I witnessed an event that took me many years to figure out. A deer had been wounded. As the deer thrashed around, struggling to get up, it sat head upright and alert but immobilized. The fellow who had wounded him was absolutely enraged. He stomped around, screaming, yelling and cussing, “____damn, mother____ing, son of a bitch.” The rage went on for a while before he pumped two more rounds of buckshot into the deer’s neck from about two feet away. I could not figure out why he was so angry. Was the deer supposed to beat his head against a tree and kill himself? Why was the hunter feeling so helpless, angry and weak? Why was he acting from insecurity and anger?
I believe that the hunter had been socialized with the necessary dysfunctions, insecurities and low emotional intelligence to survive a win/lose era. It is nothing knew that powerlessness produces rage. I believe that the hunter’s rage came from a sense of powerlessness to make the kill. Even though the hunter was the one doing the victimizing, he felt so weak as to bring out this rage. The powerlessness of the mass victimization era was a requirement of survival. It provided the drive for humans to perform the many brutal and horrible win/lose acts needed to survive. Our denial and inability to see or feel from the other party’s perspective then allows us live with it. Even today, as we daily kill millions of animals for food the denial trait allows us to ignore the pain of these living and feeling beings.
Perhaps we needed this feeling of weakness, fear and insecurity in order to drive us to survive in a Win/Lose Era. Though the hunter was not in fear of starving, as he may have been prior to the Agricultural Age, the same insecurities were needed for survival in a win/lose Industrial Age. The fear of losing is a prime motivator in a Win/Lose Era.
Children, through varying degrees of abuses or conditioning from dysfunctional families and societies, are provided with the necessary dysfunctions and insecurities to survive in an immature win/lose world. As we do what is necessary to survive in a win/lose worldview we drive our children to insanity in order to live in an insane world. Today we see these as dysfunctions because they are beginning to no longer work in society.
Those like John Bradshaw in Creating Love and his PBS specials on the family and Leo Buscalgia and many, many others are documenting these dysfunctions. We were taught to judge, blame and not to listen to others, because we were judged, blamed and not listened to. We pass these win/lose survival traits down from generation to generation. The result now is a world on the verge of a win-win paradigm shift, which is still entrenched in win/lose habit patterns.
We see this phenomenon with adults who were abused as children. It is quite regular for these people to abuse their children. The third generation then grows up to abuse the next generation. The habit pattern is passed from generation to generation. It wasn’t very long ago that a man could beat and abuse his wife and children as desired. The PBS special Violence : An American Tradition stated that it was legal for a man to beat his wife as long as he used a stick no larger than his thumb. I guess this was the rule of thumb!! Beatings were the social norm and the legal system did not interfere. The brutality of the finite wealth era made us tough in order to survive in a brutal world. As boys we are taught to be tough. We are taught to shut off our feelings and emotions. “Be a big boy, don’t cry. What are you a sissy?”
The ultimate win/lose activity is war. We socialize young men with the necessary insecurities and dysfunctions to survive this ultimate win/lose reality. We send boys to boot camp for basic training. These boys, for several weeks, are intentionally verbally and mentally abused. This abuse desensitizes, toughens and deadens the recruits. It lowers their emotional intelligence and spiritual awareness and forces them to see from the most limited and narrow of perspectives. It provides them with the necessary dysfunctions to objectify their enemy. The last thing one wants to do is to empathize with one’s enemy. We intentionally induce distress patterns or false neural associations. We intentionally build a strong win/lose paradigm. War amplifies our distress patterns greatly.
When these boys come back from wars, like Vietnam, many try to repair this warped view of reality with support groups. Huge numbers of Vietnam veterans wander through society today unable to function because of the distress patterns induced. When we look at the bigger picture, becoming hard and calloused is not a good thing. It is very easy to be tough. A rock is tough. It has no feelings. It is also not alive. As we have adapted for the finite wealth creation era we are simply less conscious. We are less alive and self-aware of the effects of our actions. We see ourselves as victims even when our actions are in reality creating our problem.
Individuals are not willing to understand others because, from our win/lose paradigm, there seems to be little in it for the individual. In addition, individuals are too insecure because they have not, themselves, gotten enough understanding and empathy. Since being heard and understood is a human need, the result is a world of scarcity filled with people starved to be heard and understood, with everybody talking and few people listening.
The bottom line is that a finite wealth paradigm operated based upon win/lose competition, mass victimization and fear. The science of breakpoint shows that as one approaches breakpoint, inertia and mass increases and if the old system isn’t abandoned, one must eventually hit a brick wall–a violent breakpoint.
In order for humans to interconnect and tap the infinite wealth of an Information Age, we must have far higher levels of emotional intelligence and spiritual awareness than we’ve had to date. Our high levels of fear and obsession with win/lose make us like children who have not yet fully developed and therefore must be watched, supervised and regulated. And this is what controlled economies do for us. Fear keeps us from fully developing. The greed and selfishness of humanity, which many see as human nature, is simply the immaturity of humanity in our evolutionary trek. This immaturity has been maintained by our paradigm of finite wealth and scarcity.
If we go into an Information Age and develop no more emotional intelligence and spiritual awareness than we have today, then we’ll simply destroy ourselves out of the fear derived from our win/lose paradigm. Today we are like a group of five year olds who are having our Play Dough replaced with plastic explosives. We are in fact a civilization of children with enormous potential to destroy or create.
Copyright 2000 by Barry Carter
About Barry Carter.
Infinite Wealth is available at the author’s website, and can be purchased in bookstores everywhere including Amazon and Barnes & Nobel.
There is also an abbreviated free online version, which has been reposed at Future Positive: 1) The Rise of a Win Win Civilization 2) A Personal Journey of Discovery 3) Why Corporations Don’t Work 4) The Emancipation of Capitalism 5) Mass Privatization: Organizing in the Information Age 6) Decentralized Wealth Creation 7) The Infinite Wealth Potential of Liberated Humans 8) The Mandate for Win-Win Wealth Creation 9) Breakpoint: Why You Must Act Now 10) SYNOCRACY: True Democracy Through Synergy 11) THE SHIFT: Awaking to a Win-Win World 12) The Synthesis of a Win-Win World and 13)Vision for a Synergic Transition.